In The Cartoon Graveyard
There are a number of things that any sane person would find offensive about the last episode of Doctor Who (please note: this post isn't really about Doctor Who, just give it a paragraph or two and it settles down); the version of Winston Churchill composed entirely of mannerisms and soundbites that never once seems like a real person, or the multi-coloured merchandising-friendly new Daleks, or the complete absence of any character given to Amy Pond (or the Doctor, for that matter), or the way that the new Daleks happen to know that a robot is a bomb when they shouldn't even know he exists. Of course, though, none of these things come close to the most moronic item of the story; when the Daleks forcibly switch on London's lights for no sodding reason whatsoever, and intone "the humans will destroy themselves" as the Luftwaffe advance on the city.
This is stupid for all sorts of reasons; at best, it would lead to a worse-than-usual bombing of London, which doesn't quite equate to wiping out humanity. The very assumption that London = Civilisation is ridiculous initially, the sort of thing that you'd normally write off to aberrantly bad scripting. In context, though, this this scene is just the most spectacular version of the story's comic-book aesthetic, cut from the same cloth as the "top-ho" Spitfire pilot and the shiny-buttoned brylcreemed officers. Victory of the Daleks reflects the most shallowly mythologised view of WWII, which works like this: the Nazis lost cost the British held out; the British held out because they weathered the Blitz; they weathered the Blitz because of their chipper attitude and because Churchill was bally marvellous. That's how history worked, boys and girls. Sure, lots of people died, but only to make the whole thing marvellously bittersweet - in the world of Victory of the Daleks, the whole setting is just a theme-park of a well-known historical period, and the human suffering involved barely seems real at all.
It would be silly to pretend that this caricaturing - or even cartooning - a palatable version of history is in any way unusual. In fact, it's more or less a universal tendency; you can find examples in the way that Irish people tend to turn the Civil War into an argument between Slimy Dev and Big Mick, or quietly forget the various acts of torture committed by the 1798 rebels. The fetishisation of Rosa Parks as a Civil Rights figure is the American example.
It's not just that this over-simplification is factually inaccurate, it's that it enables the telling of convenient lies. Rosa Parks is beloved of American establishment history because she's the acceptable face of Civil Rights. It suits them to pretend - not overtly, but subtly - that Civil Rights began because a polite woman wouldn't give up her seat on the bus; in fact, it grew from countless humanitarian atrocities committed against black people, which were still being committed when the Martin Luther King-era marches were going on (of which we see footage) or when the Black Panther Society was burgeoning (which, by contrast, has been quietly excised from popular history). Focus on Parks (and King) as icons of American history, and you can take ownership of the systematic brutality that your country inflicted on its own people. You can turn your appalling past into a comfortable morality tale that sits nicely with the rest of your mythology, one where discrimination was about seats on buses, and black people were taken seriously once they started asking nicely.
In these narratives, history becomes a simply story of black-and-white morality, featuring goodies and baddies, or maybe people with not more than one flaw or redeeming feature. Hence you have a television programme treating Churchill - who, fan of his or not, is an endlessly fascinating character - as a collection of speeches and mannerisms. You can start having that "would you go back in time and kill Hitler" Moral Dilemma so beloved of cheap science fiction - the answer "No, because World War II was a result of a massive tide of anti-semitism, economic collapse, and a lingering German resentment over the crippling conditions imposed on them by the Treaty of Versailles, and if Hitler hadn't come along someone else probably would have" isn't an acceptable answer in a Comic Book History, because that's not how comic books work.
Caricaturing the past is one thing; caricaturing the present, though, is so common that many people don't even notice it. Certainly, caricature is how the knee-jerk reactionary commentariat (I'm trying to avoid mentioning the D**ly M**l by name here) operate, and how they can present addled opinion as a form of debate. Reactionary arguments are almost never consistent - the sort of tedious guffbag who argues for lower taxes will frequently complain about the condition of hospitals, and see no apparent contradiction - but when you live in a world of caricature, you don't see any reason that your arguments should be consistent. You just end up with a series of tropes, slogans to which you instinctively attach approval or outrage... in much the same way that your view of Churchill might be filed under Greatest 20th Century Briton, Smoked Cigars, That's It*.
In an Irish context, what's so worrying is how freely this technique is used, to the almost total exclusion of any rational debate. Much of what passes for informed comment is only distinguishable from an Editorial Cartoon because it doesn't feature any drawings.
It's almost too boring to talk about Trade Unions, the Government, the Meeja and the will-they won't-they pay deal drama at this point... still, I've started now, and it seems important to point out just how much caricaturing is engaged in by both sides (although, really, the fact that I've just described the people involved as "sides" tells you everything about how this boring argument has been conducted). On one side, you have the Trade Unions insisting that their workers are the most vulnerable members of society, that no-one in the private sector has really taken a pay cut, and that Seán Fitzpatrick's got all our money. On the other there's the vast majority of the media commentariat propagating the image of a "public sector worker" - in this particular cartoon, it's important to remember that all public servants are exactly the same - as a lazy, tea-swilling freeloader who works at a desk, dreaming up new forms to make people sign.
The result is two factions who throw catchphrases at each other, no more a debate than an episode of The Jeremy Kyle Show. On one side, we have The Pay Cuts Are Unfair; on the other, We Need To Save Money. The suggestion that both these things can be true barely seems to feature.
At this point we might as well look at what we know.
We know we can save money on expenditure in the Public Sector. We know this because we commissioned a great big report on it (you know, the McCarthy Report? Remember that? People thought it might be important, once upon a time). This report was limited enough in its scope as it was - it was about staff numbers and spending rather than the broad structure of the public service - and still managed to recommend €5.3bn in extra revenue. Much of this was from new charges and reduced spending, although the purpose of the report now seems to have been a way of proving that We're Spending Too Much.
We know that the pay cuts and pension levies are massively unfair. This is obvious just from looking at the numbers, even before you factor in the judges 'n' civil servant anomalies. The pay cuts make a nominal show of being progressive, but still target every single worker regardless of their pay levels. Quite simply, someone earning €30k or less should not have to take a pay cut, no matter what sector they're in. A private company should not do it. A government that believes in fairness definitely shouldn't.
Finally, we know that the cuts haven't actually saved us very much from the fiscal deficit at all. About half of the salary cuts would have gone straight back to the government in tax anyway. The holistic view sees less money circulating in the economy, which has resulted in deflation, which has lead to a loss of jobs, which all ends up as a larger Social Welfare payout and a smaller tax take. We know this is true just by looking at the deficit figures over the past year-and-a-bit, whose climb hasn't slowed in the slightest.
So yes, we need reform. However, a near-arbitrary series of pay cuts isn't "reform", it's an ineffective books-balancing exercise with no regard to a workers' value. The McCarthy Report recommended abolishing the Department of the Gaeltacht; if the Department really is of so little value, then it's hard to see why a nurse caring for cancer patients should have to take a pay cut to subsidise it.
Once consensus is reached about the need to reform things, you might then have to accept that simply laying staff off won't save all the money that you think it will, and might not be worth the social hardship you're inflicting on huge numbers of people. You might have to look at voluntary redundancies, retirements, and natural wastage. You might have to put aside the old "they take two-hour tea breaks, fuck 'em, they should be taken out and shot" line, since - amazingly enough - it's not really very helpful.
But hey, reason doesn't sell as well as indignation. We have a government that sees public resentment of government employees as an ideal opportunity to take the heat off itself for a while, and we have a media that cheerfully lets them do it. It's the sheer transparency of the ruse, and the fact that so many people have fallen for it, that really burns. We have two groups whose primary aim is to maintain their positions in their own fiefdoms, and will oversimplify anything to achieve it. That's what passes for government, now.
The clincher? It's the pensions levy, obviously. The levy was desperately unfair in all sorts of ways. It takes a proportionally higher chunk of salary from a worker earning less than €30k than it does from one earning more than €100k. It cut the take-home pay of the public sector without cutting their gross salary; if you browse through the public sector pay grades, the salaries still seem high enough to justify a second round of cuts (and meant you still weren't liable for, say, a university grant, even if your pay had effectively been cut). Most infuriating of all, it pretended to be about pensions, when it plainly was nothing of the kind - if the levy really was about pension reform, then why can't a public servant forego their pension and opt out?
The levy is a direct result of a Cartoon Debate. It suited the Government, because they were avoiding pay cuts, and presenting public sector pensions as a convenient strawman. It suited the Union Leaders, because "no pay cuts" was the macho stance they were adopting, and it enabled them to climb down from that position without looking like they'd lost the argument. The levy was more inequitable than the salary cuts, and more severe, but there was no Work to Rule action over that.
Hence we have two elites continue to parrot their own respective mantras, "Difficult Decisions" and "Protect Our Workers". Meanwhile, lost beneath the slogans, some skilled professionals do valuable jobs for little pay and even less thanks, and find themselves struggling to make ends meet. Like the ever-growing army of unemployed and working poor, they're seen as collateral, there to add texture to the story. They're not important; they're cartoons, ciphers, not really people at all.
*You may substitute "Imperialist Warmongerer" or "Guy Who Came Up With That Joke About Being Sober In The Morning" for "Greatest 20th Century Briton" if you wish. I don't want to go near that one.
This is stupid for all sorts of reasons; at best, it would lead to a worse-than-usual bombing of London, which doesn't quite equate to wiping out humanity. The very assumption that London = Civilisation is ridiculous initially, the sort of thing that you'd normally write off to aberrantly bad scripting. In context, though, this this scene is just the most spectacular version of the story's comic-book aesthetic, cut from the same cloth as the "top-ho" Spitfire pilot and the shiny-buttoned brylcreemed officers. Victory of the Daleks reflects the most shallowly mythologised view of WWII, which works like this: the Nazis lost cost the British held out; the British held out because they weathered the Blitz; they weathered the Blitz because of their chipper attitude and because Churchill was bally marvellous. That's how history worked, boys and girls. Sure, lots of people died, but only to make the whole thing marvellously bittersweet - in the world of Victory of the Daleks, the whole setting is just a theme-park of a well-known historical period, and the human suffering involved barely seems real at all.
It would be silly to pretend that this caricaturing - or even cartooning - a palatable version of history is in any way unusual. In fact, it's more or less a universal tendency; you can find examples in the way that Irish people tend to turn the Civil War into an argument between Slimy Dev and Big Mick, or quietly forget the various acts of torture committed by the 1798 rebels. The fetishisation of Rosa Parks as a Civil Rights figure is the American example.
It's not just that this over-simplification is factually inaccurate, it's that it enables the telling of convenient lies. Rosa Parks is beloved of American establishment history because she's the acceptable face of Civil Rights. It suits them to pretend - not overtly, but subtly - that Civil Rights began because a polite woman wouldn't give up her seat on the bus; in fact, it grew from countless humanitarian atrocities committed against black people, which were still being committed when the Martin Luther King-era marches were going on (of which we see footage) or when the Black Panther Society was burgeoning (which, by contrast, has been quietly excised from popular history). Focus on Parks (and King) as icons of American history, and you can take ownership of the systematic brutality that your country inflicted on its own people. You can turn your appalling past into a comfortable morality tale that sits nicely with the rest of your mythology, one where discrimination was about seats on buses, and black people were taken seriously once they started asking nicely.
In these narratives, history becomes a simply story of black-and-white morality, featuring goodies and baddies, or maybe people with not more than one flaw or redeeming feature. Hence you have a television programme treating Churchill - who, fan of his or not, is an endlessly fascinating character - as a collection of speeches and mannerisms. You can start having that "would you go back in time and kill Hitler" Moral Dilemma so beloved of cheap science fiction - the answer "No, because World War II was a result of a massive tide of anti-semitism, economic collapse, and a lingering German resentment over the crippling conditions imposed on them by the Treaty of Versailles, and if Hitler hadn't come along someone else probably would have" isn't an acceptable answer in a Comic Book History, because that's not how comic books work.
Caricaturing the past is one thing; caricaturing the present, though, is so common that many people don't even notice it. Certainly, caricature is how the knee-jerk reactionary commentariat (I'm trying to avoid mentioning the D**ly M**l by name here) operate, and how they can present addled opinion as a form of debate. Reactionary arguments are almost never consistent - the sort of tedious guffbag who argues for lower taxes will frequently complain about the condition of hospitals, and see no apparent contradiction - but when you live in a world of caricature, you don't see any reason that your arguments should be consistent. You just end up with a series of tropes, slogans to which you instinctively attach approval or outrage... in much the same way that your view of Churchill might be filed under Greatest 20th Century Briton, Smoked Cigars, That's It*.
In an Irish context, what's so worrying is how freely this technique is used, to the almost total exclusion of any rational debate. Much of what passes for informed comment is only distinguishable from an Editorial Cartoon because it doesn't feature any drawings.
It's almost too boring to talk about Trade Unions, the Government, the Meeja and the will-they won't-they pay deal drama at this point... still, I've started now, and it seems important to point out just how much caricaturing is engaged in by both sides (although, really, the fact that I've just described the people involved as "sides" tells you everything about how this boring argument has been conducted). On one side, you have the Trade Unions insisting that their workers are the most vulnerable members of society, that no-one in the private sector has really taken a pay cut, and that Seán Fitzpatrick's got all our money. On the other there's the vast majority of the media commentariat propagating the image of a "public sector worker" - in this particular cartoon, it's important to remember that all public servants are exactly the same - as a lazy, tea-swilling freeloader who works at a desk, dreaming up new forms to make people sign.
The result is two factions who throw catchphrases at each other, no more a debate than an episode of The Jeremy Kyle Show. On one side, we have The Pay Cuts Are Unfair; on the other, We Need To Save Money. The suggestion that both these things can be true barely seems to feature.
At this point we might as well look at what we know.
We know we can save money on expenditure in the Public Sector. We know this because we commissioned a great big report on it (you know, the McCarthy Report? Remember that? People thought it might be important, once upon a time). This report was limited enough in its scope as it was - it was about staff numbers and spending rather than the broad structure of the public service - and still managed to recommend €5.3bn in extra revenue. Much of this was from new charges and reduced spending, although the purpose of the report now seems to have been a way of proving that We're Spending Too Much.
We know that the pay cuts and pension levies are massively unfair. This is obvious just from looking at the numbers, even before you factor in the judges 'n' civil servant anomalies. The pay cuts make a nominal show of being progressive, but still target every single worker regardless of their pay levels. Quite simply, someone earning €30k or less should not have to take a pay cut, no matter what sector they're in. A private company should not do it. A government that believes in fairness definitely shouldn't.
Finally, we know that the cuts haven't actually saved us very much from the fiscal deficit at all. About half of the salary cuts would have gone straight back to the government in tax anyway. The holistic view sees less money circulating in the economy, which has resulted in deflation, which has lead to a loss of jobs, which all ends up as a larger Social Welfare payout and a smaller tax take. We know this is true just by looking at the deficit figures over the past year-and-a-bit, whose climb hasn't slowed in the slightest.
So yes, we need reform. However, a near-arbitrary series of pay cuts isn't "reform", it's an ineffective books-balancing exercise with no regard to a workers' value. The McCarthy Report recommended abolishing the Department of the Gaeltacht; if the Department really is of so little value, then it's hard to see why a nurse caring for cancer patients should have to take a pay cut to subsidise it.
Once consensus is reached about the need to reform things, you might then have to accept that simply laying staff off won't save all the money that you think it will, and might not be worth the social hardship you're inflicting on huge numbers of people. You might have to look at voluntary redundancies, retirements, and natural wastage. You might have to put aside the old "they take two-hour tea breaks, fuck 'em, they should be taken out and shot" line, since - amazingly enough - it's not really very helpful.
But hey, reason doesn't sell as well as indignation. We have a government that sees public resentment of government employees as an ideal opportunity to take the heat off itself for a while, and we have a media that cheerfully lets them do it. It's the sheer transparency of the ruse, and the fact that so many people have fallen for it, that really burns. We have two groups whose primary aim is to maintain their positions in their own fiefdoms, and will oversimplify anything to achieve it. That's what passes for government, now.
The clincher? It's the pensions levy, obviously. The levy was desperately unfair in all sorts of ways. It takes a proportionally higher chunk of salary from a worker earning less than €30k than it does from one earning more than €100k. It cut the take-home pay of the public sector without cutting their gross salary; if you browse through the public sector pay grades, the salaries still seem high enough to justify a second round of cuts (and meant you still weren't liable for, say, a university grant, even if your pay had effectively been cut). Most infuriating of all, it pretended to be about pensions, when it plainly was nothing of the kind - if the levy really was about pension reform, then why can't a public servant forego their pension and opt out?
The levy is a direct result of a Cartoon Debate. It suited the Government, because they were avoiding pay cuts, and presenting public sector pensions as a convenient strawman. It suited the Union Leaders, because "no pay cuts" was the macho stance they were adopting, and it enabled them to climb down from that position without looking like they'd lost the argument. The levy was more inequitable than the salary cuts, and more severe, but there was no Work to Rule action over that.
Hence we have two elites continue to parrot their own respective mantras, "Difficult Decisions" and "Protect Our Workers". Meanwhile, lost beneath the slogans, some skilled professionals do valuable jobs for little pay and even less thanks, and find themselves struggling to make ends meet. Like the ever-growing army of unemployed and working poor, they're seen as collateral, there to add texture to the story. They're not important; they're cartoons, ciphers, not really people at all.
*You may substitute "Imperialist Warmongerer" or "Guy Who Came Up With That Joke About Being Sober In The Morning" for "Greatest 20th Century Briton" if you wish. I don't want to go near that one.
posted by Nyder O'Leary at
23:58
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